Expansive Pop, Hypnotic Jazz, Surprising Metal

In a recent stretch away from the road, Robbie Fulks wrote and recorded 50 songs. Well, probably more than that, but at the moment he’s heaving 50 at us, online only, with indifferent sequencing: on “50-Vc. Doberman,” available at robbiefulks.com, they’re in alphabetical order. We might eventually come to see Mr. Fulks as something like a wordier, more musically elastic, American Nick Lowe: a soulful songwriter, a lethal mimic, a comedian of manners and a student of pop. He’s serious about the nuts and bolts of American pop-song traditions — from ’90s pop-country to ’70s FM-radio rock to ’60s acoustic folk and hundred-year-old Appalachian murder ballads — but he’s not sentimental about them.

Musically he comes within a hair’s breadth of parody; lyrically he sinks deep into unreliable narrators. “50-Vc. Doberman” staggers around, as varied in style as in intent, plumbing the brains of a film historian (“Charles Thomas Samuels”), a nebbish in a sputtering relationship (“Guess I Got It Wrong”), a perpetually broke average Joe (“It’s About the Money”), a confused racist (“Look at Her Cry”) and Beyoncé (his disappointingly faithful version of “Irreplaceable”). It’s a little hard to get close to, and some of these songs are almost failures. But he’s having fun, and 50 of these go down amazingly easy.

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The singer and songwriter Robbie Fulks.Credit
Jim Herrington

Horace Parlan

You can find hypnosis at a jazz performance once in a while if you’re lucky, and only if the band you’re hearing really knows what it’s doing. From jazz records this happens far less often: it takes a lot of repetition to create that hypnotic feeling, and when musicians are in the studio, they don’t often give themselves the luxurious space needed to repeat and repeat and repeat a phrase, working small variations therein. But Horace Parlan, the pianist, did this regularly on his records. Grant Green, the guitarist, did it a lot too, and so did Booker Ervin, the tenor saxophonist. They were all together on “Up & Down,” one of Mr. Parlan’s best records, from 1961, which has just been issued on CD by Blue Note for the first time in the United States.

It can claim you: at regular intervals while listening to this elegantly beseeching, blues-haunted music you might find yourself rapt, unable to do other things. Mr. Parlan’s right hand was partly damaged by polio, and so his soloing style doesn’t stream forth in single notes; it’s more like accompanying on a grand scale. With his bands he dug in, almost strumming his chords, and the quality of the grooves set by the bassist George Tucker and the drummer Al Harewood on “Up & Down” makes his spells more efficacious.

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The black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room.

Wolves in the Throne Room

Black metal has its rules: scoured vocals, pummeling drums without end, no melody, one big tortured misanthropic death drive. It would seem to be channeling all the melancholy of the universe, but it’s usually quite narrow. Wolves in the Throne Room, from Olympia, Wash., are helping to open up the style’s possibilities.

The group’s music is swirlier and noisier and more cathartic than most black metal; its long pieces reward your attention with real musical narrative. And though those drums keep going constantly (the part of black metal that ultimately drives me crazy), “Black Cascade,” the band’s third album, coming out this month from Southern Lord, transmits the feeling of rules being rewritten. On “Ex Cathedra,” Nathan Weaver screams a phrase I didn’t think could be inscribed in a black metal song: “I love you.”

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Chriss SutherlandCredit
Scott Sutherland

Karamanduka y Melcochita

Two Peruvian comedic singers, Karamanduka and Melcochita, teamed up to make a salsa record together in the late ’60s with the house band from the Mag record label. That’s about all the information we get on “Extra: Acabo Con Lima Huyo Pa’ New York” (“I’m Done With Lima, I’m Fleeing to New York”), just reissued by Sonoramico. It takes its cues from New York salsa; the jam called “Machupichu” jokingly refers to musicians in the band as the Peruvian Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente.

Elsewhere the singers are meowing like cats or laughing like mad scientists, and, in “Booga Jazz,” imitating American rock ’n’ rollers. But they swing too, and it’s generally a lean and killer record, with a driving band, making deep, diaphanous grooves. (Find it at descarga.com.)

Chriss Sutherland

If you’re in the Portland, Me., area and you want ragged folk-rock, you come see this guy. Chriss Sutherland, now in his early 30s, helped start the band Fire on Fire, and some of his band mates help out on “Worried Love” (Peapod), his second solo album. His raspy holler brings emotion and a little wildness, but there’s something else; you might not get what it is until the middle of the record, when he sings his version of the flamenco singer Camaron de la Isla’s hit “Volando Voy,” in Spanish, complete with ragged palmas (hand claps). It’s Andalusian grit translated into a modern American hippie mood, and it works.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Expansive Pop, Hypnotic Jazz, Surprising Metal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe